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When "superboss" goes too far
"Today's code is all about effortful superiority: the successful deserve their sucess because they get on the treadmill and sweat"
n November, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) released an article titled “14 things successful people do before breakfast.” The Economist writes that WEF’s so-called successful person, whom they refer to as a “superboss,” wakes “up with the lark...They exercise furiously. They spend time on a “personal-passion project”. (“Novel-writing and art-making are easy to skip when you’ve been in meetings all day.”) They connect with their spouses. (“What could be better than pre-dawn sex to energize you for the day?”) They make their beds (because this is supposedly correlated with increased productivity). They spend quality time with the family. They network over coffee. They meditate to clear their minds. And so on. But they still find time to work on an important business project.
Wow. If you’re rolling your eyes after reading that, you’re not alone. The WEF article and what it stood for was quickly mocked on Twitter. One commenter asked, “By ‘before breakfast,’ you mean the 24 hours leading up to breakfast?” Another said this list represented a busy month for him. Despite this criticism, the list represents real growing pressures in the elite business world to be superhuman. As The Economist notes, “In the pre-industrial world, elites abided by a code of conspicuous leisure. In the era of gentlemanly capitalism, they replaced this with a code of effortless superiority. Today’s code is all about effortful superiority: the successful deserve their success because they get on the treadmill and sweat.”
While we do have a treadmill desk at The Boardroom, this was not exactly our purpose in placing it there.